World hunger

Interesting piece in today's FT:

QUOTE "The correct response is to give priority to dealing with hunger, with access to foodstuffs and to food production in poorer countries" Celso Amorim, Brazil's foreign minister, told the FT last week. "And to give priority to tackling the root of the problem: the enormous subsidies in rich countries that undermine production in developing nations. World hunger is not a result of a lack of supply, but principally of the low income levels in poor countries."UNQUOTE

The last sentence deserves a bit of elaboration. Notwithstanding the lies of Western "leaders," hunger in the Third World isn't principally caused by uncontrollable circumstances such as droughts and overpopulation. Droughts and overpopulation are problems to be sure, but not the primary culprits. The primary culprit is the superimposition of an artificial system of resource extraction from the Third World, using arcane tools of banking, finance, and international law, and backed by military coercion, overthrow of legitimate governments, and targeted assassinations if the earlier measures fail (aka neocolonialism). To give a simple example, poor countries are frequently having to devote their land to the growth of export-oriented cash crops to service the debts of Western loan sharks -- and these loans are meant to be unpayable. Similar examples are rife. In like vein, the use of corn for fuel is bringing about higher food prices all over the globe. The point is that world hunger and malnutrition -- both in poor countries and the affluent North -- is an engineered phenomenon.